Thor Heyerdahl dies at 87

The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who died last night at the age of 87, sailed into history in 1947 when he crossed the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa wood raft.

He also sailed into an academic storm: he was trying to prove that the Pacific had been settled by Polynesian navigators travelling from east to west, rather than the other way. He set off on the Kon-Tiki expedition - the title of his book which sold 20 million copies in 67 languages - simply to prove that it could be done.

He and his colleagues sailed for 4,000 miles, baked in the sun, flinched from sharks, lived off algae strained through muslin and flying fish which accidently landed on the logs and knocked themselves unconscious. They wrung out their clothing to save the morning dew and spread tarpaulin to catch the rain showers.

They made it, and one of the crew, Bengt Danielsson, later settled on Tahiti. But Heyerdahl's epic demonstration that the experts were wrong - they had said such a voyage was impossible - proved nothing. He fought for decades to make his point. But all the evidence - archaeological, cultural, linguistic, blood grouping and genetic - showed that the Pacific islanders had embarked on their long, gradual colonisation of the Pacific from the old world.

Heyerdahl's love affair with adventure began in 1938, with a romantic journey to the Marquesas, the islands celebrated by Herman Melville and later settled by the French. After the second world war he developed an unorthodox, even cranky, view of the progress of human settlement, arguing that people from Egypt could have colonised the Americas, and then transported a culture across the Pacific. But he did something cranks do not normally do: he demonstrated that such feats were possible. He built a papyrus dhow with Nilotic rigging and sailed it from Egypt to the Americas. Then he went back to the landscape of ancient Sumer, now Iraq, built a reed catamaran and sailed it from the Tigris to the Horn of Africa, just to complete the chain.

His scientific pronouncements would occasionally reduce professional anthropologists and archaeologists to bilious fury. At one stage he seemed to be claiming that mysterious and vanished Viking-like figures had crossed from the old world to the new, and then established the giant statues of Easter island in one hop from South America.

He also tried to link pyramid cultures in Egypt, Peru, Mexico and Tenerife. He was almost certainly wrong. But he backed up his wrong-headedness with genuine achievement: he used the tools of the past, and the materials available to an adventurous people, in epic and spectacularly successful adventures.

In doing so, he opened up the world of anthropology to a new generation, and to new ideas.

While at his family retreat in Italy, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He stopped taking food, water and medication this month, and prepared for death.

His son, also called Thor Heyerdahl, said last night that his father had died surrounded by his family. He is survived by his third wife, Jacqueline, four of his five children, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.